


the tides of war

by gisho



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Found Family, Spies and Secret Agents, Warning: Canon-Typical Violence, distant pre-canon, warning: plague
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-05 04:22:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17318003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gisho/pseuds/gisho
Summary: An unexpected mission sends Axel, loyal guardsman of the Emperor of the Romans, to the strange town at the source of the Dyne - and more unexpectedly, to a place that feels like home.





	the tides of war

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Azzandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/gifts).



> For azzandra in the 2018 spark-exchange, for the prompt: "Higgs was originally a spy working for the enemies of the Heterodynes, and his job was to infiltrate Mechanicsburg. He succeeds, but then falls into genuine loyalty and switches to the Heterodynes' side. Basically the story of how he starts loving this wacky town and its weirdly charismatic leader." Hope you enjoy!

People said things about the gates of Mekhanburg. They said they were built entirely of human bone, that they opened only to the sound of a bell, that they bled when the Hetrodyn walked through them. They said they stood as tall as twelve men standing on each other's shoulders. They said they were made entirely of gold, melted down from the temple hoards of the Hetrodyn's enemies. Axel found himself weirdly disappointed that they were wooden, barely twenty cubits high. 

There were no monsters on the gateposts. There was a parapet that could have held a sentry, but it looked empty. The gates of Mekhanburg stood wide open and unguarded, and that was almost as strange as their being made of gold and bone would have been. 

Axel rebalanced his axe on his shoulder, took a deep breath, and stepped through. 

Inside the walls, the town still looked - normal. No strange carvings on the walls. The buildings were of ordinary-looking planking. The street was still dirt. He could hear street-vendor yelling somewhere, too tangled and distant to make out what language it was, let alone the words. All in all it was much less impressive than he'd expected from the stories. At the next intersection he turned left, towards the yelling, and saw the castle.

It was - impressive. The one stone building he'd seen, some pale stone that didn't match the grey bulk of Mekhan Tor beneath it. Its central tower stood huge and ominously blank,but on the parapet hung a row of - he couldn't be sure at this distance. They looked like bird skulls. They had to be cubits long to be visible from this distance. Impressive, but not nearly so elegant as the Hagia Sophia. 

"Nov revikahnka kabi?" said a voice behind his shoulder.

Axel whirled around. The voice had come from a girl who barely came up to his shoulder, long dark hair and dressed in a black gown. She was grinning. It was a friendly grin. "Sh'mora kabi?"

Probably not a threat. He held up his hands. "Do you speak Roman?"

She brightened. "Oh yes! You have come from outside? Do you like our Castle?"

"It's very big," he said, which was true. Most of the tribute must have gone to its construction. 

"Why are you here?"

"Looking to join up," he explained, and patted the axe. "Heard you were looking for warriors." It was even true. Just horribly misleading.

\--

It had been a cold night, most of a month ago, when his allagator woke Axel at some time well past midnight. "Shh," he'd said, and then, "You've been summoned. Come quickly." His suspicion must have shown in his eyes - a month ago everyone had assumed Axel would be the next allagator - and the other man held up his hands. "Bring your axe if you like."

It wouldn't be much use if he was being led to ambush, but Axel brought his axe. He carried it into the palace past two unmoving gate-guards, through dim corridors lit only by dangling wizardstones in pink and green, and finally, to his amazement, to the office of the kanikleos. His allagator ushered him inside. The kanikleos himself was there. "Sir," Axel said; he wasn't sure if he should bow.

The kanikleos was a tall, skinny man, with shadows under his eyes. "Axel," he said, as gravely as if it were an honorific itself. "I called you here tonight because I have a mission for you. You alone, and not one you can speak publicly about."

Oh. 

"You can read and write, I'm told. Unusual skill for a guardsman."

"Yes, sir. I pick things up easily."

"How about languages?"

"Roman, Greek, and Norse. Some Arabic." There were others, but those were what he'd admitted to his friends in the guard. Were they sending him away? Guarding some diplomat travelling in secret? It would explain why the kanikleos was the one asking him questions. 

"It will do." The kanikleos tapped his fingers on his hip. "You were passed over for promotion recently, in favor of a man with less experience. Enough to make anyone bitter." 

Out of the corner of his eye Axel could see the allagator going stiff, uncomfortable. Hah. He shrugged. "I'm in no hurry."

"Nonetheless." The kanikleos held up a finger. In the morning, you're going to tender your resignation, having decided your prospects are better somewhere else. And then, you're going to travel to Mekhanburg, and enlist in the Hetrodyn's army. Caligula just passed away; we got the message this afternoon. Her son Daedalus is Hetrodyn now, and he's likely to increase his fighting strength. Do you understand?"

He'd been a fisherman, once. And then he'd been a minion, and a brewer's helper, and a caravan guard, and now a palace guard. _Spy_ wasn't one he'd expected to add to the list. But if the Emperor Andronikos needed a spy in Mekhanburg, what could he do but make the attempt? "I understand," he said. "Sending letters back with merchants?"

"Exactly." The kanikleos smiled like a hungry dog. "Now, there are certain things we need especially to know ..."

\--

The first thing he saw in the market was a Jägermonster buying sausages. There were stalls lining the road, people with carts piked high with cabbages or angry, terrified baskets of chickens, a baker whose table was covered in huge helical loaves, but Axel noted all that with half a mind; the Jägermonster took up most of his attention.

The monster was covered in green fur, and had pointed black claws instead of fingernails, and as soon as she spotted him the girl who'd been showing him the way around yelled "Nagybacsi!" and ran over to throw her arms around him.

"Unokahug," the monster answered, with a grin that showed entirely too pointy teeth. The girl looked up and started to babble, speaking, from the sound of it, the same language she'd greeted him in. 

Why did they send someone who didn't so much as speak the language?

Oh well. He dug in his pocket for a coin, and turned to the sausage seller. "Do you speak Roman?"

"I do. Fancy some dragon sausage?"

"Dragon?" That was some sort of joke, right? That had to be some sort of joke. 

"Limited time offer! Just until we run out! I mean, we had to do _something_ with all the flesh." Apparently Axel's befuddled look counted as encouragement, because the sausage seller went on, "Caligula's dragon? Poor thing went berserk when she died. Had to put it down. We got a lot of good hide, though. And meat!"

Automatically, Axel's eyes followed the sausage-on-a-stick that was being waved in front of his face. "It smells like chicken," he ventured. 

"Of course it does. Bird musculature for successful flight." The sausage seller was grinning as if this were significant. "Just a denari. May the Castle eat me if this isn't the finest sausage you've ever tasted."

That was an oddly specific oath. Axel shrugged, and handed over the coin. 

The sausage tasted like chicken too, underneath a generous helping of spices, and when Axel had to prod a piece of gristle out of the gap where his tooth used to be it tasted like chickenbone. Mekhanburg must be rich to sell spices so cheaply, but then again, they were ruled by a wizard. Maybe he could make things grow here that belonged in India. 

"You know that's not really dragon," said a familiar voice. He looked down. The girl in black was glaring at the sausage seller. "That was _inhospitable_." She spoke the last word like she wasn't quite sure of the pronunciation, but was sure it needed to be menacing. 

"Hey! The Castle didn't swallow me up!" The sausage seller's hands were waving frantically, look-no-weapons style, and the next sentence was in rapidfire dialect. Obviously this was another round of some longstanding competition. Three women with big loaves of bread had stopped their conversation to watch, and they were, gradually, becoming the focus of everyone standing around in the street. 

Axel almost jumped when he felt a heavy, clawed hand descend on his shoulder. "She's right, you know, the Jägermonster said into his ear. "It's not real dragon."

"I figured as much. Still tastes good." Axel shrugged. "Do you know where I could find the recruiting officer?"

"Recruiting?"

Okay, obviously Roman wasn't his first language. "I want to join the Hetrodyn's army. Who do I talk to?" He hefted his axe, for demonstration. 

The Jägermonster thought about this for a little bit, and then grinned a very toothy grin. "You come to our hall," he said, "and talk to General Ishkov. And then, you try some _real_ dragon meat."

\--

"To Kiev?" The words felt odd, still; there was something sharp and awkward about the Mechanicsburg dialect that didn't seem to fit a human mouth. A lot of the inhabitants spoke Roman or Ruthene - a lot of the inhabitants, he'd picked up from conversation, had parents or grandparents who'd been brought here as prisoners of war - but it was obvious what language was most important in Mekhanburg. "Why Kiev?"

"Well, why wait? Don't want them turning up at home." Ignen grinned. He had the too-many-teeth like so many of the Jägermon - Jägers, they called themselves - and mottled brown fur like a tabby cat. "Master Daedalus brought _nodakshak_ , you know."

"I didn't know." It was so hard to keep track of things when you were still barely learning the language. "What's that?"

"Uh." Ignen blinked a few times. "It's ... like fire?" He waved at the campfire they were all gathered around, and that Axel and Kalman were roasting their dinner on, being human and disinclined to eat rabbits raw. "Like fire but blue."

Kalman offered in Roman, in tones of deep resignation, "It drives horses wild. But don't think you're getting any jerky out of it."

Horses, right, the Golden Horde had horses, and things that weren't horses but served the same purpose. The army of the Hetrodyn only had packhorses, and moved at a brisk walking pace. There was every chance the Golden Horde, if they had warning of the advance, would meet them on the way to Kiev. No one seemed worried by this idea; Axel had cautiously brought it up, a few times, only for his comrades-in-arms to laugh.

It wasn't his job to correct strategy. It would just be a pity to get shot full of arrows before he could send home a firsthand account of what the Hetrodyn's army could do. 

The Golden Horde, exactly as he'd feared, met them halfway. They had just enough warning from the crows - that was what Ignen said, when he woke Axel in the middle of the night, hoarse and frantic, and Axel didn't think it was time for a vocabulary lesson - to pick their ground, and they made a frantic dash in the dark to a narrow spot in the hills, somewhere a disjointed mob of melee fighters, each wielding their own favorite weapon and few with more armour than chainmail, stood a chance against disciplined cavalry. At least, onward to somewhere called Valley, the rest of whose name he hadn't caught. The rest he hoped was true.

Dawn crept up damp and grey. They shuffled their feet to keep warm and checked and rechecked their weapons and waited. "I hate this part," the horned, grey-furred Jäger Axel had wound up next to confided, in an undertone.

"Waiting?"

"They're so _close_. I can hear their horses." He could? "But Master Daedalus says, stay put." The Jäger was tapping his fingers on the hilts of the two short swords he wore at either hip. "Nice axe you have," he added. 

Axel could only shrug. "Don't know how it works on horses."

"Has an edge?"

"Yes?"

"It works."

They fell back into silence after that. Eventually Axel did hear the noise of approaching hoofbeats, and a little while after that - a very little while, it seemed like, with his ordinary human senses - the Horde was on them.

He didn't remember much of the battle, only fragments. There was whooping, blood on the rocks. At one point a horse ran straight at him, screaming, covered in, yes, blue fire; he rolled aside just in time to feel the heat as it stormed past, and slammed his axe into the shoulder of a man trying to unsheathe a sword, and scrambled to his feet again. Arrows whistled past him. He swung his axe, and someone screamed, and he jumped away from a sword, and the person screaming was him, not in pain but some emotion too strong to name. The axe went _thunk_. Someone lept at him, and he swung the axe into their way. The sun was coming out. He could tell by the heat. He mostly saw red. 

After a while someone plucked the axe from his numb fingers. A clawed hand, covered in thick grey fur. "Hey," someone said. "It's over. We won."

"Won," Axel repeated numbly. He took the axe back and settled it on his shoulder. 

"Won." It was the same jäger he'd been standing beside, before the battle. He was grinning. "Good spinning blows. You didn't tell me you're a _berserker._ " He used the Norse word; maybe there wasn't a Mekhanburg equivalent.

Axel shook his head, more to clear it than to deny anything. "Not really," he mumbled. "Still got my clothes, don't I."

"Hah."

"What happens now?"

"Horse feast." The Jäger's grin got wider. "Then we hunt the retreat."

It only took a few days for word to spread around the army about his berserker tendencies. Half a dozen Jägers showed up to challenge him. The grey-furred one, whose name turned out to be Herodotus - "My mother liked the classics! Not my fault!" - put them off on Axel's behalf by pointing out they were still on campaign, all private feuds suspended on the Hetrodyn's order.

"It's not a feud," one of them, a skinny creature with teeth like needles, protested. "I just want to try him out."

"Still banned," Herodotus growled, and knocked the dramatic sword-point aside with his skewer of duckmeat.

Axel realized he was, for once, looking forward to the next battle.

By the time they got to Kiev the city gates were shut tight, the scattering of buildings outside abandoned. The horde set up camp outside the gate. The Hetrodyn's tent was glowing purple at the seams, and the muffled sound of small explosions kept ringing out from it, but everyone else gathered around red-and-gold campfires, speaking in low voices, laughing at each other's jokes. Axel wound up with Herodotus again, and a human called Novik - how natural that already felt, to divide the army in his mind by humans and Jägers, instead of melee fighters and archers, or common soldiers and officers - with shaggy nut-brown hair and a suspiciously close shave. Soldiers and camp followers, that distinction still lived in the Hetrodyn's horde, but there had always been people who jumped the line. Novik chewed on a stalk of grass and asked smith's questions about his axe, most of which Axel could only shrug at. "Do you know how that fancy knife you keep playing with was made?" he finally snapped, which was bad form, but he was nervous and tired and he probably wouldn't get to kill anything for weeks. 

Novik shrugged and flipped it around in his hand, and the firelight glimmered off the blade. "Nobody knows. Damascus knives are wizard-work."

That caught Axel's attention. He'd seen Damascus swords, a few noblemen back in Constantinople used them, but - "How'd you get one of those, then?"

"Off a _nlikrop_ in Macedonia last year. Good steel doesn't make good minds." There had to be a story there, and it was probably beyond Axel's vocabulary. He scowled at nothing in particular. Novik placidly went on, "The sword, my father made. He beat it out of Hungarian steel and quenched it with blood."

"Er."

"Pig blood." Novik smirked, then slumped a little. "And it probably won't get better for the rest of the season."

"Why not? D'you really think the Golden Horde will _surrender_?"

It was Herodotus who answered, jerking his thumb over his shoulder to the strangely-glowing tent, where the Hetrodyn Daedalus and his consort Helen were - doing something. Wizardly business, had to be, to make a glow like that. "I don't think they'll get a chance."

There must have been the usual accoutrements of a siege in the morning - messenger sent to parlay, taunts from the walls - but Axel missed them; he was one of the three dozen men Helen snatched up to follow her into the woods. "Trees," she demanded, "six as tall as three horses are long, fifteen more as long as one horse, and someone - look, this is what we're building," and she leapt down from her horse and snatched away Ignen's sword, which for some reason he didn't protest, to start sketching something in the dirt. 

Right. He was working for _wizards_ now.

Axel spent the morning chopping trees with a borrowed hatchet, and a fuming afternoon sharpening his battleaxe. The Thing They Were Building, meanwhile, took shape at the front of the camp. It was a warm summer's day. Crops were gently ripening in the fields. The sky was broad and blue and cloudless. Somebody had spent the morning hunting a rock lizard, and the afternoon roasting it on a spit, even though it was really too big for the spit they'd put together for the dead horses. Smoke was drifting up from Kiev. There was still fuel enough for cookfires in the city, food enough to make them useful, and no one was really terrified yet.

That, or people were setting buildings on fire.

Almost certainly cooking fires. Not enough smoke. 

He hadn't heard whatever negotiations happened, or failed to happen. Not his job. But Axel was there to watch the next morning as the Thing They Were Building flung a cauldronfull of glowing pink slime at the gates of Kiev, and the slime turned into a cloud of smoke and a massive noise filled the air, like an explosion smeared out over the space of a dozen breaths, or the rumble of a collapsing wall. When the smoke cleared most of the gate was a pile of rubble. 

There was a rumbling from the Jägers, but Daedalus was screaming, "Hold! Hold!"

"Why?" someone screamed back, to general laughter. 

It was a fair question. A rush now would give them men inside the city, and waiting give them a chance to concentrate their defenders, maybe even shore up the gate. But what Helen yelled back was, "Because it's still _hot_! Give it an hour!"

At Axel's side Ignen sighed. "Give it an hour, they'll find somebody to surrender," he muttered. "Oh well. At least we got one good battle out of it."

\--

_Dearest Irene, I've just returned from Kiev._

He didn't really need to worry. There were few enough men in the barracks who could read, fewer who could read Roman, and his unnerving friend Herodotus wouldn't barge into his room unannounced like, say, Zoltan and Novik did. But who knew what would happen to his message on its way? He traced out the letters for _great victory_ , marvelling at the way they sunk into the paper. From the way people talked of Mekhanburg back in Constantinople, he'd half-expected to be scratching his missives onto a waxed board. Instead, there was a craftsman, with a shop right on the main street, who made paper for the Hetrodyn's records all day and sold the castoff sheets to anyone for no more than the price of a good meal at an inn. It really was a miraculous place.

He picked his words carefully, trying to think of what would be relevant to the kanikleos. There were _four hundred Jägers, can you believe that?_ And mighty as the horde was, it _moved almost at a cavalry pace. They know how to live off the land, and take only a few packhorses. Their tactics in battle are wild, though, with no formation larger than two friends fighting back-to-back. It could hardly be otherwise, for each one bears a different weapon, according to their own taste ..._ He added a line about how impressed they'd been by his battleaxe. Then a description of the two-day siege of Kiev, and how the pink glowing stuff Daedalus had cooked had taken down the gate. 

Just the sort of gossip any soldier in a foreign land might send to his sweetheart back home, enough to cover both sides of the page.

Not long afterwards, as summer was hitting its peak, the merchant Abdul-Rahman passed through Mekhanburg. He rolled his five wagons into the Merchant's Hall and laid out bolts of British wool and French linen and Lithuanian spider-silk, and half the town, it seemed like, poured in to inspect his wares. Shahnaz, his daughter, chanted their wonders. Stolen from the deepest part of the forest where great ancient spiders spun the strongest web! Shorn from the blue woad-lambs bred by Queen Albia's wizards! She sold perfumes, too, and girls crept up stealthily to the wagon they slept in, in the evenings, asking for sniffs. 

Axel crept up in the evening with a different request, clutching an old towel sewn up around the letter and a jar of honey-snails. "Will you take this to Irene at Euterpe's inn?" 

Abdul-Rahman took the bundle, hefting it thoughtfully. He knew where it would really end up. He'd carried plenty of messages to Euterpe's inn; the kanikleos had recommended him by name. "I can do that, certainly."

\--

Winter came down like a pack of starving wolves, and two cold days left snow on the streets as high as a man's hips. 

It went on like that for a fortnight. The snow piled up around the eaves of every building. In the day the Hetrodyn's soldiers earned their winter keep clearing roads, and in the evenings they went to the Jägerhall and sat around the fire, a massive bonfire built in a stone circle twenty cubits across, and drank and told stories. Townsfolk turned up too - butchers and bakers and brewers at the insistence of the seneschal to keep the feast going; the seneschal herself to discourage stupidity, she claimed, and certainly her disappointed cough had cut through the noise to produce a few guilty starts among the Jägers; old people to warm their bones at a better fire than their own houses could manage; children to listen to the stories. "It wasn't always like this," Axel found himself informing a girl of seven or eight years, clutching a green doll with what he darkly suspected were real canine teeth sewn on its face. "When I was as old as you are, the rivers didn't even freeze."

"That was ages ago," the girl informed him, voice thick with scorn. "You're _old._ You're probably _thirty_."

That was an underestimate, and just how far an underestimate Axel didn't care to admit. "I guess so," he said. "Times change, right?"

"Places too," a voice from behind hom piped in. It was the seneschal, and Axel jerked automatically to attention. "You're from Constantinople, right?"

"Yes, ma'am." 

"Constantinople is further south than Mekhanburg," the seneschal told the little girl. "So it's warmer, even during the same winter."

Which was nicely scientific and logical, and the little girl accepted it with a nod. And it was utterly misleading. Axel had come from Constantinople last; he hadn't grown up there. He'd grown up in the cold lands of the north, and spent winters listening for the tromp of trolls in the howling winds outside while his mother, back before her tail had grown back and she vanished into the forest, sat by the fire spinning, humming songs nobody else quite wanted to learn. 

And the winters had still not been so early and so cold. Something about the world was changing, not just where he stood. 

The seneschal must have mentioned him, or General Ishkov, because the next night the Hetrodyn's son Hephaestus pulled Axel into a dark corner of the hall and started asking him questions about Constantinople. Axel had just about gotten used to the cheery informality of the horde; it was strange to be ordered around, with absolute confidence and not the least consideration to the absurd idea of _not being obeyed_ , by a boy of fourteen. Not that the strangeness stopped Axel from obeying. He felt dizzy from the interrogation - that was what it was, he noticed after a while, stern questions of defenses and walls and military readiness. "Planning a siege?" He tried to make a joke of it.

"Maybe," Hephaestus said, dead serious. "But it's better not to. You saw what happened at Kiev." 

Axel could only shrug. "The Golden Horde aren't used to running that side of a siege."

"Tell me more." Hephaestus said it with the absolute conviction of a small child or a king, as if the idea of not being obeyed had simply never occurred to him.

But then, what reason would Axel have to hide the details of the Hetrodyn's campaigns from the Herodyn's heir? Probably he was offering nothing more than an alternate perspective on things Daedalus and Helen had already told their son over supper.

After a while the noise died down. Some people had headed back out through the snowy streets to their own houses; more had staked out a place right here, on the floor, and in the flickering shadows it was hard to tell the humans from the Jägers. The exception was General Ishkov, a huge shape on the floor, lying dead still, with three small children snuggled up against his massive flank. They must have fallen asleep listening to him tell stories of the campaign.

And Hephaestus was yawning, looking like he was staying awake by sheer willpower. "Why don't I tell you the rest tomorrow, it would take all night," Axel said, which was true if he included the parts about the negotiations he'd only gotten secondhand. His memories of being fourteen were fuzzy, but being tired all the time, he remembered. Because you're using all your energy to grow, his grandfather said. "Do you want me to walk you back to the castle?"

"In case there are wolves on the streets?" Hephaestus's grin was almost fanged, but the way his eyes sparkled made it a joke. "No, I'll stay here. D'you have a spare blanket?"

It occured to Axel a little before dawn, as he lay on the straw floor of the Jägerhall listening to the townspeople snore, the shuffling of some early riser throwing another log on the fire, that in Constantinople he'd never have been woken up by the only son of his lord and master elbowing him in the kidney. He'd probably never have spoken to the boy.

\--

It was April, and the snow had barely finished dripping away into the hidden caverns beneath the Dyne, when they got a messenger announcing the Coalition of Wizards of the Western Plain - a euphemism for Pannonia, Axel assumed - was on its way to conquer Mekhanburg, and the Hetrodyn's prompt surrender would be much appreciated.

"They're idiots," was Ignen's diagnosis. "The Hetrodyn is the greatest wizard in Europa. Everyone knows that."

"Not everyone," Herodotus offered. "Or we wouldn't have to keep proving it."

"Shut up."

"Do you look like a General?"

Ignen didn't bother answering that one, just launched himself straight at Herodotus, with bared teeth. The charge knocked him off his stool, but he rallied with a roar, and Ignen and Herodotus were rolling together toward the door, yanking at each other's fur and aiming bruising blows with their elbows. Axel studiously ignored them and kept sharpening his axe. Some of the other humans were wincing as they watched, but play-fighting, he'd determined, was just something Jägers _did_ , and they knew better than to inflict any serious injury in the process. It had been the same with the gang who'd just wanted to try him out: plenty of enthusiasm, plenty of bruises, no broken bones.

Janos - one of the newest Jägers, only raised to the horde at Midwinter, and Axel had all sorts of questions and no answers as to how that worked - scratched his red-furred skull. "Weird that they're wizards," he said. "Most of the time it's kings."

"No," offered a human Axel didn't know by name, with a great drooping mustache. "It just means they killed their kings. Someday wizards will rule everyone."

That got the laugh it deserved, including from Axel, and he went on sharpening his axe.

The truth, he was fairly sure, was that Mekhanburg was special. Most wizards could never be rulers. He'd heard stories, and he'd had an unpleasant encounter with one himself, when he was barely thirty. Sometimes Axel still wondered what his life would be like if he'd made his peace with his restlessness, kept the house, found a new wife, gone on as a fisherman. He'd probably be a gray-bearded grandfather by now. He might well be dead. Instead he'd picked a direction - south, since it was that or east - and started rowing.

There had been a witch, deep in the Lithuanian forests. Finding her vast wooden house had felt the start of a fairytale. Falling into her sway after she gave him supper and wine, in distant retrospect, felt like the bad part of a fairytale, the part his braver and cleverer younger brother would have come to rescue him from, except that Axel was an only child.

At the time it hadn't felt like much of anything. For three years, he couldn't remember _thinking_ at all. 

Eventually she had made a mistake in her potion recipes, died cursing with purple foam on her lips, and her servants awoke blinking as if from a long dream. Most of them she'd taken from nearby villages, when they went too deep in the forest gathering mushrooms. Axel stayed long enough to help burn down her house, and fled before anyone could remember she'd tested the potion on him, and he hadn't died screaming. 

The Coalition of Wizards of the Western Plain turned up at the gates of the valley in May; the Hetrodyn had declared that they weren't riding out for. They were a motley bunch, most of their horses devoted to pulling wagons they'd covered in multicolored metal in, Axel assumed, a sad attempt to be intimidating. He was watching from atop the walls; the humans had been ordered up there with crossbows and slingshots and assorted unpleasant-looking things from the Castle armory, while the Jägerhorde went out to meet the invaders face-to-face and hand-to-claw. "Intimidation tactic," Novik informed Axel, and went back to wiping down the tips of his crossbow bolts with something unpleasantly red. He'd lugged up a whole hamper of bolts. "Mekhanburg has better monsters, see."

"You think that's what they have in those wagons?"

"Maybe. Who cares? If they do they'll have eyes. All eyes are squishy." Novik gave the shrug of a man who viewed meleé combat as an excellent opportunity to test the effective radius of a morningstar. 

It turned out two of them did, massive beasts that trembled and pawed at the ground and jerked on their restraining chains soon as the wagon-sides were lifted. Things that had been boars once, by the look of them. The ragged cheering of the Jägers rose into the air. Jägers looked at a monster like that and thought _good fight_ , and then _good dinner_. The third wagon revealed - well. Axel wasn't sure what it was meant to be. It looked like some of the ropes had gotten tangled together in transport.

Novik sighed. "This is going to be _no fun at all_ ," he intoned, and up and down the wall heads were nodding. By which he meant, _boring_. They'd called Axel a berserker, but apparently all Mekhanburghers were battle-mad in the dangerous and everyday way, the way that went looking for them.

It was a boring battle for the humans, as it turned out, but the boar-things were delicious roasted.

\--

Summer was short and damp and turned into a rain-soaked autumn, enlivened by the news that the Hetrodyn's envoy to the Romans had come back with an offer of a non-aggression pact. It was the sensible thing. Mekhanburg was too small, right now, to be more than an annoyance to Constantinople; Constantinople was busy with Ban Dušan and the Eternal Sultan and could little spare the defenses. Axel patiently explained as much over beer to Zoltan, who seemed offended by the very idea of a peace treaty, and Khrizhan, who seemed to expect Axel to be offended, an attitude he wouldn't have expected from a Jäger. "Is fine," he kept saying, grammar eroded by the beer. "You stick around, we fight the Romans again. Someday. Not that long."

Axel could only shrug. "Why would I want to?"

"Why else you here? They make you angry, you join their enemies. Right?"

He would have been getting a headache, if he was the sort of person who ever got headaches. Somehow he'd ended up immune to that particular malady. Chills, yes, agues, horrible digestive ailments, but he didn't get headaches. It was handy when arguing with idiots. "I came because I was tired of sitting around the palace not fighting anything," he said; it was the most sympathetic lie. "If we're not fighting the Romans, that just means more time to fight somebody else."

"Listen to the man," Zoltan said, and scowled into his stein. His moustache was covered in foam, but he didn't appear to have noticed. "Nobody keeps treaties. We're bright mushrooms when Andronikos Palaiologos gets hungry."

The urge to defend his old - his leigelord, still, if at a remove, was buried in his confusion. "Bright mushrooms?"

"Uh." Zoltan squinted at his beer stein, and it took a few seconds before he offered, in Roman, "Easy hit."

Oh. Of course. Luminous mushrooms, to find in the dark. 

Which still didn't make it accurate - the Hetrodyn might _claim_ territory to the Roman border, but in practice the intervening land was ruled by Bulgar bandits and princelings. Axel had barely gotten to Mekhanburg in one piece. An army either way would show up exhausted. He thought. Axel wasn't a strategist and he didn't know if either side had some secret plan. But neither, it occurred to him, did Zoltan.

"Is no problem," Khrizhan said, and banged his stein on the table. "We win anyway."

Axel barely kept from rolling his eyes. "Why?"

"Because we are Jägerkin!" 

The roar was enough to break up the pub's conversation, and his human drinking companions stared at him, blinking in confusion. There were other Jägers in the pub - one flirting with the lady pouring drinks, two having an arm-wrestling match in front of an appreciative audience - but it was them Khrizhan was clapping on the shoulders, tusked face twisted into a beaming smile.

After a few blinks Zoltan offered, "You know something we don't?"

"What?"

"We're human," Axel pointed out. "Not that we're not glad you think we can fight, but -"

"Oh, well, you fight with the Jägerkin," Khrizhan said, and shrugged. "Close enough."

By now the murmur of the crowd had come back, and no one was paying attention to them anymore. Zoltan lifted his stein, grinning. "Fair. So who do you think will attack us next, now the Romans are playing nice?"

They debated that one for two more steins, until Khrizhan declared, loudly enough for the greenish Jäger who'd flirting with the lady pouring drinks to hear, that if any of his brothers would rather stay home in bed than fight Dušan's cavalry he would take their share of the loot, and then there was a very immediate answer to the question of who would attack them next: the greenish Jäger.

The resulting fight drew in all six Jägers in the pub and a dozen humans. Axel wasn't one of them; he'd only dealt enough blows to duck under a table and away, and as the lady serving drinks hit the greenish Jäger over the head with a chair, he slipped through the door and out into the chilly night. 

His breath left clouds in the air. The cold was coming back, fast and early.

There was a letter, hidden in Axel's chest beneath his mammoth-fur cloak. It had arrived with Abdul-Rahman the cloth merchant three days ago, and two days ago he'd sprinkled it with vinegar to reveal the hidden message between the gossipy letter from Irene at Euterpe's inn. Stay where you are, it said. Keep sending us all you can. Watch for an increase in forces.

It was only sensible that they leave him. Who knew if the Hetrodyn believed in treaties?

\--

The Hetrodyn had sent messengers demanding tribute from the the hometowns of the defeated Wizards of the West. Tribute had not been forthcoming. "They had their chance," Daedalus declared, and as soon as the weather cleared the horde left to go get some tribute, up close and personal. Some people, Herodotus had told them all deadpan when Daedalus came to announce the campaign, were so much more reasonable about tribute when the Hetrodyn spoke to them in person.

Some people, but what they actually got was a lot of begging and pleading and explanations that Prince Istvan had taken all their treasure, would the Hetrodyn have mercy? 

By the third village the Hetrodyn had mercy but no more patience, and he informed the nervous headwoman that she'd be coming with them to show the way to Prince Istvan.

"Why have we never _heard_ of this _nlikrop_ ," Hephaestus growled over supper at anyone who would listen, which, since he was the Hetrodyn's son, was anyone in hearing range. He'd apparently formed an attachment to Novik in the course of getting knife-fighting lessons, so he was having supper with Novik and Ignen and Axel while his father was too busy brewing to eat. "The wizards last year didn't mention having some sort of overlord. And if he sprung up and terrified them all over the winter that's duckling fast work." 

Axel could only shrug. He'd just about gotten used to _duckling_ as a profane adjective. "I guess we'll find out. Four hours march more, right?"

"Right." Hephaestus rolled his eyes. "I don't understand it."

"What?"

"How you're so ... _philosophical_." He said the last word in Roman, which was probably just as well. "Don't you ever get mad at anyone?"

"Don't have to get mad at someone to cleave them in twain," he explained, and patted the handle of his axe. 

Ignen, beside him, burst out laughing. "So sensible," he managed between gasps. 

The next afternoon they walked into a thickening mist, until Axel could barely see far enough to follow Ignen's broad shoulders. Their footfalls were muffled, conversation dead, and the fog was condensing on his boots and helmet and the blade of his axe. It would need oiling. It reminded Axel of his days in the witch's house. The landscape looked like the inside of his head had felt.

Far ahead someone screamed.

His axe was out and ready but there was nothing to hit. The screaming was layered now, and someone was bellowing, "Ambuscade! Ambuscade!" An arrow whistled past him. Instinctively Axel ducked, not that it was likely to help when their enemies had to be shooting blind, too. He thought he heard Ignen screaming. Behind him, then, a little to the left, and Axel plunged into the bracken with a hiss, not screaming, because noise would mean they could shoot the sound. He just had to hope he didn't step on a twig.

That much was clear in his memory. The rest blurred, berserker fury or cowardly suppressed memory or, Axel suspected, the result of a mind focused so hard on the meleé everything else fell aside, the way weavers could look up from the loom after a long afternoon and wonder why their midday meal had gone cold and the light had changed so much. He remembered finding someone with a scimitar and without a trilobite badge and with a breastplate but not with a breastplate better than his axe.He remembered dancing away from a rivulet of something he couldn't see for all the fog pouring up from it. He remembered back into someone, actually backing into, and the two of them doing a comic spin, axe and sword upraised, before he noticed they had green fur and the face of the flirtatious Jäger that Krizhan had the pub-fight with, in the distant past of last autumn, and they laughed together and ran off side by side. He remembered the sudden wind that knocked him on his side with the sudden strength of a charging auroch, and how he landed wrong from the surprise, and the snap of his rib against the rock.

In the heat of battle he would have shrugged it off, but Axel had spent so long scrambling about in the fog that just lying still, clutching the rock outcropping to be sure he wasn't blown away, felt like all the effort he could put in. He was still lying there as the fog blew away, and as the wind shut off as suddenly as it had begun, showing the blue sky already going reddish in the west, and the great black bulk of a castle silhouetted against it. So. They really were at Prince Istvan's castle. When he finally dragged himself upright he could see the groaning injured men and Jägers, strewn over the grassy expanse like wisps of straw left blown about a field after harvest. And the bodies.

\--

Prince Istvan didn't get a funeral. A human with Ethiopian looks who Axel didn't know, who'd helped Daedalus find Istvan in the fog, was given the honor of holding the spike with his head on top until they found a suitable mire to sink it. 

There was, though, a more dignified ending for Zoltan. Like all the men who'd died in battle at their side, he was burnt with the fallen Jägers. In death they made no distinction. 

Breathing carefully, even though his rib had stopped hurting as soon as Hephaestus rubbed some awful-smelling salve on it, Axel watched Ignen's tabby-colored fur lie unnaturally flat and still as the flames crept closer. He should have been thinking of his friend's bravery. He kept thinking of his mother's cat. There were cats who would fight off wolves for the children of their households, but Axel's mother had no fear of wolves, and she'd kept a small sweet thing that hunted nothing bigger than rats, with short, mottled brown fur, just like Ignen. Axel remembered waking up on cold mornings with the cat draped over his chest and tail curled around his neck. Axel remembered, too, seeing the soft brown fur blood-matted and how she had mewed at him as she died. It was an eighty-year-old memory, and it stung no worse now than the broken rib. 

This wasn't his first battle. He watched the pyre until the smoke smeared against the sky, thinking dark thoughts of wizards and kings.

\--

By the time the Golden Horde came back, Hephaestus's bitter comment was, "Took them long enough." 

Which was a fair complaint. He'd missed that campaign, a boy of thirteen; he was sixteen now and the word 'man' was plausible, if a little odd for his beardlessness. Novik, who he'd drafted to test the reloading time on his latest experimental crossbow, hefted it to his shoulder and let fly. The bolt landed with a thunk, in the red ring of the target, and Novik was already yanking back the lever for the next shot. "They had to breed the bears," he suggested, and let fly again. Count of seven that time; Axel scribbled it down on his slate. "Can't just grab them out of the woods."

"Do they really think bears will _help_?"

Thunk. Count of nine. "Might be," Novik said, and lowered the crossbow. "They have thicker skin than horses. We'll need ranged weapons. Do you think you can build a lot more of these?"

"In three days? Maybe a dozen." Hephaestus plucked the slate from Axel's fingers. "Average of nine," he announced. "A dozen prototypes, and maybe this winter I can improve the mechanism. I have some ideas about flaming arrows." Novik's eyes lit up, and Axel pinched his nose and wondered how exactly he'd become the third party to a pair of exotic-weapons maniacs. One of whom was heir to the Hetrodyn. 

It was eight days later when they met the Golden Horde in the awkward twist of a valley somewhere near the Lost Fortress of Dacia, and it occurred to Axel, watching the roaring charge, that maybe they'd picked bears in the hopes of flat-out terrifying their enemies into surrender - in which case, they didn't know the Hetrodyn's army very well.

Then the shape at the back of the line he'd thought was a small hill reared up and roared.

Well, he was scared now. But beside him Janos gasped in delight, and then, to Axel's amazement, turned to grin at him. "Come on! We can get there ahead of Khrizhan!"

"We?"

"Axe is good on bear," Janos said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and then he was off, sword swirling before him in a pattern that had no right to be so showy and so effective at once, and Axel had no choice but to follow. He thought he heard the snick of the experimental crossbows somewhere behind them. 

It was, in the end, a team effort: four humans and six Jägers, dancing in to hack at whatever part was nearest while the enraged creature spun in hapless circles - its human rider having gone down to Mikkel's halberd almost as soon as they ran up - and finally collapsed, exhausted, bringing its eyes in range of Janos's longsword. _All eyes are squishy_ , Novik had said, last time they had to deal with monsters. 

They dragged the bear back to Mekhanburg, for all that it took a week; Lady Helen claimed its vast fur for a tapestry in the castle's great hall, and the rest became a not-quite-seasonal roast for the victory party, carved up into pieces no bigger than a boar and put on bonfires in the Forum. 

Axel had always hung back from the celebrations. Battle was battle, it was impossible not to be swept up; cheering for an enemy of Constantinople felt too far, and he'd cultivated a reputation as a wet blanket. This time he still felt on edge. And weren't Constantinople and Mekhanburg meant to be allies now?

Herodotus was deep in his cups by the time Axel found him, so deep he was on top a barrel, doing a jig. He wasn't a bad dancer even so; the ring of ladies clapping to keep time certainly seemed to appreciate it.

"Come on down before you get hurt," Axel called, to a chorus of laughs and disappointed noises. 

Herodotus stopped, at least, and put his hands on his hips. "And why? I'm mighty! I'm _invincible_!" That he said in Roman, and Axel rolled his eyes and wondered how he'd wound up friends with an intellectual Jäger. 

One of the audience, a girl with braids who looked barely twelve, called back, "What does _invincible_ mean?"

"It means I'm stronger than anybody! Nobody elss can fight me and win!"

To hell with it. "So if nobody else can hurt you," Axel said, "you can only hurt yourself, right? I don't want you to. Come down and we'll get brandy."

"He has a point," the braided girl announced, smothering a giggle.

It was probably more the promise of brandy than the intellectual argument, but Herodotus hopped down. He threw an arm over Axel's shoulders. "Where's the brandy?"

"Dunno. We have to hunt for it."

They found some at the nearest inn, which was doing so brisk a business they'd somehow opened up their whole front wall, and wandered off together, Herodotus swaying gently from side to side and his grey fur ruffling with each breath. "Okay," he finally said, stopping to lean on a convenient bollard Axel was reasonably sure hadn't been there when the war party left. Well, Mekhanburg was a town, towns got built. "Why did you really want me down? You can't think a Jäger would get hurt falling off a barrel."

Damn him for his clear head. "Of course not. You're the invincible warriors of the Hetrodyn."

"Absolutivipositly," his friend said. Okay, forget the clear head. 

Axel leaned back against the nearest wall and said, as if it had just occurred to him, "Why?"

"Huh?"

"I counted last winter. Thirty men asked to join the Jägers. Five new Jägers turned up at the celebration. Who'd take those odds?"

He'd counted in Pannonia, too. Two hundred or so Jägers and as many humans brought to the battle with Istvan; three Jägers and thirty-seven humans on the pyre afterwards, and that wasn't counting humans lost to disease or accident on the road, although the Hetrodyn's soldiers did better with disease than any army he'd heard of. Maybe it evened out. He still had to ask. The kanikleos back in Constantinople wouldn't care, but Axel was allowed human curiosity. 

Herodotus took a long time to answer. When he finally did it was with a careless shrug that almost sent his brandy splashing onto the street. "My brothers all did," he said. "And they wanted me to be their brother forever."

"So you took a chance on dying right away?"

"Would have died a Jäger, anyway." Herodotus's hand waved in the air, like he was trying to trace the shape of an abstract concept. "And if I didn't I would have gotten a sword in the ribs, or a case of cholera, or just old age with nothing to show for it. Now I have brothers and I fight for the Hetrodyn." He stopped, squinting at Axel. "So why are _you_ fighting?"

"Good at it," Axel said, as blandly as he could manage. And then, out of some flattering urge, "The Hetrodyn's good to work for."

"The Hetrodyn looks after us," Herodotus said, with the solemn certainty of the very drunk.

\--

The cloth wagons turned up a week late. Abdul-Rahman, it transpired, had died in Paris, catching some sudden fever which left him blue-tinged and babbling before it spiked high enough to cook him from the inside. His daughter Shahnaz told Axel all this with a philosophical shrug and the soft comment that at least he'd gotten a proper burial, and added, voice low, that she'd make sure Axel's letter got safely to Constantinople. She was, after all, taking over the business.

Shahnaz was short and plump with the delicate hands of a seamstress, and it was hard to picture her folding those hands around a crossbow to drive off brigands or the sort of monsters that might, with less luck, have deprived her father of a proper burial. Worse things happened on the road. There should have been a caravan up from Tarnovo, and Axel's regular package from Constantinople on it, three weeks ago; avalanche or roc must have struck and made it vanish whole. Roc seemed more likely, given the strange paucity of tribute wagons this summer. 

Axel had been a caravan guard once. He'd marvelled at the snows of the Tien Shan, fought off a starving griffin, and drunk fermented milk under the soft green boughs of the last grove in Loulan. He'd been happy most of the time, restless none of it. Take me with you, he almost said, I'll be your guard and keep the wolves from your camp. We can see the world together. 

But he was the Hetrodyn's soldier now; he could hardly abandon his post, and less so when there was another expedition readying to leave almost as soon as Shahnaz's caravan. 

"Well, the business is in good hands," he said instead, and because he was a strange man, he didn't grab her hand, only nodded, like he would to a friend in the street. "I hope you don't run into trouble on the road."

She shrugged again, but her smile was friendly. "If the roads are bad, my aurochs are strong. And if Allah wills I get to try my new firespitter, I won't complain." Ah. Firespitter made more sense than crossbow, for a woman of her build. Easier to reload. Axel passed over his letters with a grateful nod. He could probably ask General Ishkov for a discharge and get it, but the urge to abandon his master had passed.

He awoke in the small hours of the morning, suddenly cold with remembrance that his master was the Emperor Andronikos, in Constantinople, and the Hetrodyn was his target. It was easy to forget that, surrounded by comrades-in-arms. 

\--

In retrospect it should have been obvious, when the caravan from Tarnovo simply didn't turn up. 

It only took one village, this time, before the campaigners knew something was horribly wrong. Silent houses and barred doors. Usually it was barred gates and hurled insults, or open gates and begging. At the second silent village Hephaestus commanded three Jägers to go ahead and make a search while the rest of the army made uneasy camp and waited. They came back before evening had finished falling, to report a few dozen survivors camped out in the church. They'd offered their silver candlesticks up as a bribe to be left alone. 

Hephaestus sent the three back to return the candlesticks and apologize - honor wasn't a vice Axel would have expected from the Hetrodyn's heir, but he supposed the silver was too little to stretch the definition of 'enemy' for - then vanished into his tent with the seneschal.

"It's going to be like this all the way to the Iron Gorge," Janos muttered, as they sat around the fire roasting stray goat - roasting very thoroughly for once, even the Jägers. 

Axel found himself prodding with his tongue at the spot where his canine tooth should have been, and swallowed. "Won't slow us down. We can go around towns."

"What if we get to the Temple and there's nobody there?"

"Then we just walk out with Thalia's Thunderbolt," Novik snapped. He wasn't sharpening his green-bladed knife; he was using it to carve traceries in a bone about as long as his hand, which didn't seem to belong to anything they'd eaten on the way. "Perfect victory, no wounded. We can try the thing out on a cliff on the way home instead of wondering if they're going to try it out on us."

"It's not _victory_ if there's no _battle_." If Janos hadn't been a Jäger, Axel would have called his expression a pout.

Maybe that was what had been going on with the candlesticks. Civilians can't surrender.

Hephaestus emerged from his tent the next morning waving a map, and declared they probably wouldn't lose more than three days on the new route.

\--

Hephaestus had brought forty-seven warriors to storm the Temple, and forty-seven of them were walking away, but it had been a _duckling_ close thing.

"Okay," Janos offered, waving his hands in the air as he hopped backwards, out of range. "Maybe even if we didn't actually fight anyone that counts as a victory but I really don't think -"

"You want a defeat?" Novik's voice was raw from smoke inhalation, he was holding the knife right-handed because his left was still swollen and purple from the poison dart, and none of that, Axel suspected, would make any difference to the outcome if Janos didn't apologize in the next few breaths. 

Not that Janos had that much sense; he dodged sideways and screamed, "Brothers! Help me!"

"You should draw your sword!" someone helpfully called out, and there was a chorus of laughter. Axel wondered if they'd get close enough for him to trip accidentally with his axe handle. He wasn't getting up for this. He was still in one piece, but the piece was bruised and missing another tooth and had inhaled more smoke than Novik, and he wasn't getting up for anything but salve or liquor. Someone else, he couldn't make out who in the darkness, more helpfully tossed something at Janos - a quarterstaff, it looked like, better for nonlethal disputes. He whooped and swung it at Novik's knees.

It would have been a nasty blow if it had landed. Novik leapt over it and flung himself at Janos.

At least he had the sense to drop the knife; Axel could see it slipping into the grass. Stabbing Janos even when he'd been that insulting, the Hetrodyn wouldn't stand for. But Novik's screech of "You duckling nlikrop they shouldn't give you weapons you don't know what one is unless it's your sausage hammer -" was, at this point, entirely reasonable. He drove the point home with a knee to the sausage hammer, and Janos howled as they went down, grabbing at Novik's hair. 

Someone whooped, in the indiscriminately encouraging way of a spectator at a barfight. Axel settled back against the tree and folded his arms. 

"Maniac!"

"Goat!" 

"Don't you always say all eyeballs are squishy?"

"Like yours," Novik hissed, which seemed beside the point when he was elbowing Janos in the ribs, but Axel wasn't sure what Janos's point had been to begin with. "Dartslingers don't have eyes, you little -"

" _Stop._ "

The voice seemed to echo, even though there was no place it could have been echoing from. It wasn't a deep voice, particularly loud or shrill. It needed none of that to make every moving human or Jäger go still. 

Hephaestus strode forward. Janos and Novik were still on the ground, awkwardly posed like badly-shaped statues. "Sorry, master," Janos said, as if Hephaestus were the Lord Hetrodyn and not a man barely out of boyhood, given command to get the taste.

"Oh, get up," Hephaestus said, and they scrambled to their feet, looking sheepish. He looked exhausted. Exactly how you'd expect a man to look, after dodging a temple's worth of deathtraps. Fled or fallen to the plague, the Priests of Thalia hadn't left their treasure unguarded. "Can this wait? You won't have to put up with each other past tomorrow morning." 

Janos and Novik looked at each other. Looked back at Hephaestus. Janos ventured, "Why not?"

"I'm detaching the Jägers. The humans come back to Mekhanburg with me, everyone else spreads out and takes a survey." And now he looked haunted, which wasn't surprising either. "We should find out how far the plague spread. My father will want to know."

And everyone knew Jägers didn't get sick from ordinary sicknesses. Didn't die of pneumonia or fever, didn't so much as catch colds. Whether they could contract it if this plague was wizard's work -

It was a calculated risk, and it was Hephaestus who had the numbers. Axel could only hope his friends made it home. 

\--

The humans, Hephaestus - not that he wasn't human, but he seemed to belong in a separate category - and the Thunderbolt arrived back at the mouth of Mekhanburg's valley to find it covered by impenetrable fog. 

Thoroughly impenetrable. Javor's hunting spear wouldn't go into it; it stuck fast, and when Axel added his weight, the shaft snapped. 

"Of course," Hephaestus growled. The shadows hadn't left his face the whole way home, and every time they'd circled through the woods or gone scrambling up a hill rather than pass by the gates of a silent town had made them deeper. "It's been a long time since we chopped someone's head off and brought it home on a stick and then found out we got the wrong man."

"He was pretty insistent about being Istvan," Javor pointed out, as he tried to tug the broken spear-end loose. What was he talking about? Oh, right, he'd helped find the wizard who tried to hide his castle in a fogbank. Not like this one, though. They'd all walked right in. "Could be an apprentice looking for vengeance."

"Or my father's own fault." For some reason Hephaestus looked cheered by the thought. He raised his voice. "Come on, we're going around to the Other Secret Trail."

The Other Secret Trail wasn't very secret; everyone in town knew about it. It was, however, hard to find, and narrow and steep, and in general more useful going hunting than trying to bring in an invading force. It took them all of the next day to get to the trailhead; the chilly mist condensed on their clothing and the cloudcover never broke. Eventually a handful of them scrambled down from the trackless forest to the little valley where the Other Secret Trail drifted to a stop. There was a ring of stones around a firepit, a hollow spot in the rock wall piled high with brush. And a thick fog, running across the valley mouth like a wall. 

Hephaestus made a strange noise, almost like a hum. It sent a chill down Axel's spine.

Something went _twong_. A second later there was a crossbow bolt hanging out of the fog wall. 

"That was careless," Axel said, although he couldn't really blame Novik for the attempt. 

There was something odd in Hephaestus's voice as he answered, "No. That was a good try. But even if we build a _ladder_ I expect we'll just get so high we can _walk_ on _top the fogbank_ , and what will we do when it _goes away_?" This couldn't be good. " _We have to destroy it._ "

Axel took a deep breath. "If the whole valley is surrounded, I'm sure your father is trying to break out. He has-"

" _Not if he's asleep._ " It was a quiet sentence, almost trailing off into the strange not-hum again, no less chilling, as Hephaestus tapped his fingers and looked up at the blank grey clouds. 

For some reason Javor patted Axel on the shoulder, as if they were old friends,though in fact they'd barely spoken before this campaign. "You've never spent much time with wizards, have you?" he asked sympathetically.

He'd spent three years in a witch's thrall in Lithuania and drunk her mysterious potions. He'd gone drinking with alchemists in Samarkand. "The Emperor's wizards kept to themselves."

"Ah. You'll want to stand back, then," Javor offered. 

But Hephaestus was bellowing, " _Bring me the Thunderbolt_ ," and something in the tone of his voice made Axel's feet leap to obey almost as soon as the words hit his ears. 

They got the Thunderbolt into the valley as night was falling. Some practical soul had started a fire, and handed up torches to the soldiers still waiting up above; the dancing lights in the fog made Axel think of stories he'd heard about creatures that lured children away, in the brief moments he had between running after " _Oil!_ " and " _Everyone's waterskins, then, all full_ " and "There must be _goldwort somewhere_ ". Time seemed to stretch in strange ways, an hour's errand taking so little time the faint glow of the moon hadn't moved. He saw Hephaestus taking apart Novik's experimental crossbow with a knife while Novik held it in place, strangely docile about the destruction; he saw Novik pounding a tall stake into the ground witch vicious glee while Javor and Kalman held it steady. And, eventually, he heard the bellow of " _DOWN!_ ," and almost as soon as he dropped he heard the roar of thunder and saw the yellow flash, almost turning the night to day.

It was the work of a few seconds to scramble to his feet, dodge around the fire, and find Hephaestus. The man was staring into the fog, breathing hard, and beside him the arrangement of waterskins and mechanisms he'd built around Thalia's Thunderbolt was smoking gently; the long shape of the Thunderbolt itself was tilted, as if it had been knocked back by the force of its own blast, and two of its silver bands were black with soot. There was, improbably, a _dent_ in the fog. It was still glowing yellow. 

Hephaestus was breathing hard. When he finally spoke the strange tone was gone from his voice. "We can make it work," he said. "I just have to keep tuning it. Where's Novik?"

"Right here, Master," Novik answered. His eyes were bright beneath his shaggy fringe and for some reason he was grinning.

It was an hour past sunrise before the Thunderbolt ripped open a bright blue slash in the fog so long it vanished into the distance, and the fog began to peel away and disintegrate beneath it like, well, like morning mist melting in the sun.

\--

"It's called _enlightenment_ ," Javor told him, later, while they sat in the castle's improbably tall great hall beneath the giant bearskin, and Hephaestus explained to his father how he'd dispelled the fog and where all the Jägers had gone. The Thunderbolt lay on the Hetrodyn's vast round table, at a careless angle; all its silver bands were black now, and the weapon oil they'd had to cover it with for some reason was still damp and glistening. "Nobody's a wizard when they're born, but one day something just fits together in their mind and then they're throwing lightning everywhere and turning people into squirrels."

"Everyone says that happens and they heard about some hunter in Cithaeron getting turned into a squirrel," Axel muttered, "but it's never someone they knew."

"What? You don't think wizards would do that?" Javor, improbably, had even white teeth, and his grin made them stand out against his Ethiopian skin. It was probably disconcerting on purpose.

Axel rubbed his temple. "Would, yes. Can, no."

"Why not? The Hetrodyn turns people into -"

But the Hetrodyn was hurrying over toward them, and they broke off and did the casual Mekhanburg version of coming to attention. Novik and Kalman beside them did the same.

The Hetrodyn Daedalus usually looked cheerful. His face now was solemn. Maybe a month of enchanted sleep did something to your mood; maybe he'd had bad dreams. "Javor, Axel, Kalman, Novik," he said, with all the solemnity of a priest making a blessing, and set his hand on the shoulder of Novik, who was closest. "My son has told me how brave all of you were on his last campaign. I thank you for your service."

"We are honored, Master," Kalman said, as if it were the obvious next line. Axel shifted his weight, suddenly uncomfortable; if this was a play no one had given him the script."

Daedalus went on, "I've seen the same myself," a slight nod to Javor, "or heard it from my generals. You all have served the House of the Hetrodyn ably and willingly." A pause, just long enough for Axel's heart to start pounding. "And if you wish it, I would raise you to the Jägerkin this midwinter."

Someone must have said something back, but Axel's blood was pounding in his ears too loudly for him to be sure what it was. He locked his knees and tried to take a deep breath. If he wished it, _if_. He could say no and stay on as a common soldier. 

_The Hetrodyn turns people into Jägers every winter._

The words he didn't hear must have been a question, because Daedalus answered, "Of course not, General Ishkov will make you the formal offer, I just wanted you all to have warning. Think about it. But for now you're all invited to supper. I want to hear more about the expedition. And how my son broke through the fog." 

"Who did that, anyway?" Kalman looked like he was looking forward to the idea of stabbing someone. "Is there time to destroy them this season?"

Daedalus sighed. The exhaustion was back on his face; the month's sleep apparently hadn't given him any rest. "There will be nothing more this season," he said, "because I'm sealing the valley until spring. We'll let the Jägers in when they make it back, but no caravans and no messengers, and nobody leaves to go hunting. Plague that wipes out whole towns? I won't risk Mekhanburg to it. We can stand a winter's siege."

\--

The first snow came two days after they'd brought in the last harvests and sacrificed the October horse. If the plague hadn't laid siege to them the winter would have. Axel stayed outside anyway, sparring with a Jäger called Shminik who used two swords like Herodotus, untl Shminik called it off on account of wanting some nice hot wine and a wool jacket. "What?" he said, when Axel blinked at him. "We don't all have lots of nice thick fur."

The thought of Ignen and his tabby coat rose to Axel's mind, but he shoved it aside. "You're not just going easy on the human?"

"No! You stay here and freeze if you want, or you come back to the Jägerhall. All up to you."

The first snowflakes were settling on Shminik's wooden training swords, and his breath was clouding in the air. Axel smiled. "Wine sounds good."

He had comrades-in-arms here. He wasn't a Jäger yet, but they liked him, he was welcome in their hall. Every Mekhanburgher was in times of need. The Hetrodyn looked after his people, and the Hetrodyn's heir asked common soldiers to help him make new kinds of crossbow, and General Ishkov took supper at the same long trestle table as last year's recruits to the Jägerkin. Children walked the streets without fear here. There were so many festivals he lost track. At the feast of the October Horse he'd seen the seneschal nursing her infant son while three giant fanged monsters out of fairytales stood behind her and argued over whether a stuffed toy bear, or wooden blocks to build a tower, was a better toy to give him for Yule. 

He could have put that in his letters, if any letters were going in or out, and the kanikleos in the Emperor's palace in Constantinople, plotting defenses against their temporary ally while terrified servants drifted silently through his rooms, wouldn't know why.

A week later, when General Ishkov woke him after midnight and pulled him outside to explain what was required of Jäger recruits, his mind was made up. 

"I have something to confess," he said, watching his breath leave clouds in the air. They were the only clouds; it was a bright, cold night, and the air smelled of woodsmoke, and Axel found himself longing for the house he'd grown up in, far away in the cold North, for the first time he could remember. He hadn't bothered bringing his axe. If Ishkov felled him at a blow, there was no point trying to block it. "I'm a spy."

Ishkov blinked twice, slowly, and the slit pupils vanishing behind the black-furred lids only made him look more like a wildcat. "Oh, you mean for the Emperor of the Romans? That's nothing to worry about. It doesn't bar you from the Jägers." He waved a hand, although for Ishkov _paw_ might have been a better term.

All Axel could say was a weak, tremulous, "What?"

Ishkov laughed. It was a quiet laugh for someone who looked like he should roar with every word. "The Hetrodyn has his secrets, but what the army's up to isn't one of them."

"How did you know?" Falling over would be undignified. 

"Shahnaz told us." She was a double agent? "I think she's working for every city she takes the caravan through," Ishkov went on. "Amazing woman. We'd all be stumbling around thinking we were so smart without her. So, it's fine, we want you to keep spying. The question is, do you want to join the Jägerkin?"

It hadn't occurred to him that the Hetrodyn would leave the offer open. He'd been expecting exile at best. Death at worst. Ninety years was a good long life anyway.

"The choice is yours," Ishkov went on, still oddly quiet. "Say you won't, and you go back to the human army with honor and our thanks. Say you will, and we welcome you to the Jägerkin, in life or in death."

Axel figured he'd gone too far to turn back.

He took a deep breath and said, "I will."

\--

He remembered feeling hands on his shoulders, low voices murmuring reassurance, even as he gasped silently from the fire running through his veins. Every breath was freshly painful, every twitch of his muscles as he tried to write away from the agony only increased it. They were small, familiar hands, and he wanted to say something, grab onto them. Keep steady.

This wasn't going to last forever. Either the pain would kill him, or it would recede. 

Multiple voices, worried tones. "Some kind of record," a woman was saying, but whatever she said next was lost in a rushing wave of pain as he took too deep a breath.

When he next felt awake, or something not too far from it, he was cold all over and he could hear dripping water, the noise of deep breathing. He tried to take a breath. It scraped on his throat, but it went in. No more pain than there had been before. 

"I think he's waking up," said a voice he was almost sure belonged to Lady Helen. He wanted to agree, but the effort of speech seemed like too much. He raised a hand. 

Footsteps, and suddenly there was an arm behind his back, lifting him up. Being moved hurt, but not as much as moving himself. "I think so too," said Daedalus. "Axel? Can you open your eyes?"

He forced them open. The cellar of the Hetrodyn's castle looked, once the stabbing feeling had receded, just like it had when he lay down. Dark, cool, trickling water on the rocks, more like a cave than a cellar. Like the place a mystery cult would take initiates. They couldn't be more than thirty cubits above the Dyne spring, wherever it was buried. Could they? Trying to think about the Castle gates and the place where the Dyne poured out of the tor was making his head hurt. 

This was a one-time problem, right? He wasn't going to get headaches all the time now? 

"You've done two unprecedented things," Daedalus told him. "You stayed unconscious for six days, and you don't actually look any different. Have some magical blood you should have told us about?" 

The laugh in his voice made it into a joke, but - he did, didn't he? His voice came out a ragged croak. "Mother." 

"Really? How interesting, I wish we had some blood of yours from _before_ , there must be _fascinating things_ about it, let me _draw some now and we'll see._ " His voice was doing the same strange things Hephaestus's had while he was adjusting the Thunderbolt.

The voice this time was the seneschal's. "And then you let him rest. He'll want six days of sleep." 

"Don't worry," said a voice he didn't recognize, a deep grating one like stone scraping together that seemed to come from all directions at once. "I'll make sure it's quiet."

Sleep sounded wonderful, but there was one thing he had to ask, first. He tried to glance around the cellar. Sixteen of them had joined the Jägerkin. There were no bodies here. "Who else?"

"Javor lived." That was Lady Helen again, firm and matter-of-fact. 

In other words, Novik didn't.

Tell Hephaestus I'm sorry, Axel wanted to say, but he was already slipping back into unconsciousness.

\--

They'd held back the pyre and the feast. Javor was wrapped in an ordinary bearskin, resting in a huge wooden chair someone had dragged from the Great Hall to the Jägerhall; he'd traded the Ethiopian skin for black fur and slit pupils, like an younger version of General Ishkov. Axel sat in the second chair just before his strained legs gave out, and someone threw a blanket over him. Not usual, but it was so cold, and he was so tired. 

"You didn't tell me you used to work for a witch, Axel," Hephaestus said, and landed on the bench beside him with the air of someone who belonged there. His eyes were a little red, in that telling way no feeling person would mention. 

Axel could only shrug. "Didn't think whatever she gave me worked. She still died of it."

"Maybe it only worked on you because your mother was some kind of forest spirit." Hephaestus was grinning; he held out his stein, but Axel made a weak noise of refusal and he took it back to drain himself. "Maybe your fangs are just coming in _really slowly_. I wonder how strong you're going to be?"

"Maybe it didn't work at all for me," Axel muttered. He felt more like he'd had influenza than like he'd been transformed. He looked exactly the same. 

"Of course it worked for you," Hephaestus said, quiet and serious, and waved at the high-piled wood, the fourteen shrouded bodies. A hush was falling over the Jägerhall. "They're the ones it didn't work for. Quiet now, they're about to light the pyre."

Axel pressed his tongue to the spot where his tooth used to be. Tried to. It felt like there was a tooth again, an ordinary human tooth right where he'd had one to start with.

\--

Five years later, still fangless and clawless and looking just like himself despite his newfound ability to lift massive stone blocks, Axel was summoned to the Hetrodyn's castle.

His last year's pay had never turned up from Constantinople, and the rumour was that there had been another quiet rearrangement of the government and the bodies dragged out for the crows. There might be no one left alive in the palace who knew he was their spy, and Irene at Euterpe's inn wouldn't talk. He'd reported it to General Ishkov, anyway, and decided he was well shut of the business. 

Which was why his first reaction, when the seneschal informed him, "We need you to be a spy," was, "I'm not anymore."

Hephaestus had spread his hands. "We need you to be again," he said. "We got word from an expatriate in Baghdad. Someone's selling miniature cannons. Small enough to carry in one hand."

"Miniature cannons?" He blinked. "Sounds like wizard work."

"It's _not_ , though, that's what makes this so dangerous. I'd show you the sample she sent but it blew to pieces. Just from sulfur and saltpetre! We checked!" He sounded offended by the very idea of someone blowing things up who wasn't a wizard. "So we need someone to go to Baghdad and find out more, and it would help if they're hard to blow to pieces. Good thing your fangs never came in, don't you think?"

Miniature cannons. Useful for an army, and with the state of the Roman provinces and Greece and - everywhere in Europa, really, after that horrible plague, any ambitious fellow in Asia might decide to round up an army and try his luck. Axel swallowed. "Maybe so," he allowed. "What else do you know? Did the one that blew up leave pieces?" 

The seneschal pulled a bundle of papers from her pocket, folded together and tied with a blue ribbon. "The pieces are in the armory," she said. "Come on, we'll tell you the rest on the way."

Well. 

He had, Axel told himself, joined up for the adventure.

\--

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to the Second Bulgarian Empire for writing them out of existence because I couldn't resist making Higgs work for someone called Andronikos and miss a promotion to allagator. You were fascinating, really! Just not funny. Apologies to the readers also for any anachronisms I just missed, on top of the deliberate ones for clarity - obviously history went different places in Europa, but I tried to change it only as worldbuilding required.
> 
> And thanks to Led Zeppelin for excellent writing music.


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